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"All images Michael Fordham
Having recently landed from California and been saturated by the enduringly big, brash and bold car culture of the USA, we thought it would be good to share our Friday car crush live and direct from "

Alfaholics: Guilia GTA Reborn

Alfaholics, run by the Banks family, (Max, (below) his brother Andrew and father Richard), have for the last decade or so been the go-to people if you want to trade, restore or build a classic Alfa. And with race-bred factory Guilia Coupé GTAs becoming rarer and more expensive every year, they are building a thriving business in recreating fully specced examples of the car – with modern Alfa parts and every bit of the soul of the originals.

The Alfa Romeo 105 Series Guilia Coupé is surely one of the most evocative and desireable of classic Alfas. In its stripped-down, lightweight GTA guise, which dominated touring car racing in the 1960s, the desirability of the cars goes through the roof. Asking prices of course follow suit. In fact, a nice example of an original GTA has been known to edge into six figures.

The GTA was originally launched in 1965 with a 1600 engine, but the two replica GTAs that have been built so far by the Banks family have been equipped with 2.0 litre Twin Spark power plants that produce in the region of 200 BHP. It’s not just full track spec rebuilds that can be provided. A full range of bolt-on parts to enhance and improve a basic Alfa, including engines, suspension and brake kits for speccing up your car for the road or track.

This bespoke parts service remains the core of the Banks’s business. Years of experience thus guarantees that should you want to go for the full GTA re-creation, there is no better knowledge base from which to work.

Once you have sourced the base car, (which could be any decent 105 series coupé), a full ground-up rebuild and recreation of a GTA will cost around £60k.

The question obviously arises: do these recreations constitute classics in themselves? Or are they mere representations of classic elements; simulacra that will never quite match the originals? Take a look at the pictures of these beautiful creations – then, you decide.

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If you're even vaguely interested in car culture, you must have realised by now that Alfa Romeo has recently celebrated its Centenary. There's already been an acreage of coverage of stuff about the great marque, whose fortunes of late have "

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